


let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

by bookishandbossy



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Meet-Cute, Snowed In
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-04
Updated: 2019-01-04
Packaged: 2019-10-03 22:06:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17292305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookishandbossy/pseuds/bookishandbossy
Summary: Mystery author Jemma Simmons is stuck at a cabin in an artists' retreat in New York, with a massive case of writer's block and snow piling up outside her windows, until an artist named Leo Fitz quite literally stumbles through her door.





	let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kienova](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kienova/gifts).



> Written for kienova66 as part of the Fitzsimmons Secret Santa over on Tumblr.

Jemma Simmons had to kill someone by teatime and she had absolutely no idea how to do it. The possibilities, of course, were limitless. It could be the jealous ex-lover, the brother angling for a larger share of the family inheritance, the embittered wife, the mysterious butler...any number of the inhabitants of Hounslow Manor could murder Frederick Hounslow, their illustrious host. The ways in which he could be murdered were similarly endless. Poison in the tea, the ever-popular shooting accident, a simple yet effective push down the stairs. Although someone had been pushed down the stairs and died of a broken neck four books ago. Cecily Vane, her intrepid lady detective, had conduced analysis on the shoe prints left on the carpet to determine the killer. So clearly they couldn't be pushed down the stairs this time. And in the last book, the murder had been made to look like a suicide and in the one before that, they had been stabbed through the heart and in the one before that, they had been drowned in two feet of water. 

Jemma scowled down at her laptop and wished fervently for a piece of paper she could ball up and throw dramatically across the room. The first draft of this book was due to her editor in a month and a half and all she had to show for the hours she'd supposedly spent working on it was eight thousand words and not a single dead body in sight. Writers' block had never really been a problem, before. She'd had moments when she didn't know how to get a plot from here to there, of course, or when a character was being particularly stubborn. But she'd always written in great leaps and bursts, the words spilling out of her almost too quickly for her fingers to capture. And she always, always met her deadlines. But then, after one politely received cozy mystery and a modestly successful series, the Cecily Vane books had become best-sellers. And then the BBC had made a show out of it. With Peggy Carter, the award-winning actress and national treasure. And then the books had sold even better. So maybe she was feeling just the tiniest bit of pressure. The Fortnum and Mason hamper and thoughtful hand-written note Peggy Carter had sent telling her how much she loved the books didn't help either.

So her agent had suggested this artists retreat in rural Vermont. Log cabins, crackling fires, hampers full of food delivered to her door, and nothing to do but write. No phone signal, Wi-Fi only for two hours each night, and virtually no socializing at all. The other guests had been at the first night's wine and cheese evening but they'd all retreated back to their own cabins after that, probably to be more productive than her. Besides, with the massive blizzard that was supposed to arrive overnight, they would all be stuck in their own cabins until the snow stopped and someone dug them out. There had been a note about the storm on top of her morning delivery, along with extra baskets of food and a care package from Bobbi and Daisy that had arrived just in time. (A gorgeous massive blue scarf, three fat paperbacks, an assortment of bath bombs, a hot chocolate mix that Daisy swore was one of the most decadent things she'd ever tasted, and a small bottle of rum to spike the hot chocolate with.) It was supposed to be one of the worst to hit the region in years—freezing temperatures, blustering winds, and an endless barrage of snow. 

Maybe the blizzard would serve as inspiration. Get her in a proper murder-y mood. Suspicious characters trapped together by a fluke of the weather were a staple of mystery novels. Admittedly, she'd had characters trapped in a inn by flooding in the fourth Cecily Vane book. But still. Inspiration. Ingenuity. A word count that finally went in the correct direction. Jemma bent intently over her laptop and began thinking of the best way to really convey the horror of a blood-curdling scream in the middle of the night. 

 

The snow was nearly up to her windowsills when the knocking started. She was halfway through a pot of tea, staring uselessly at her laptop screen and thinking longingly about rewatching another episode of Doctor Who. Then, in the middle of Cecily Vane creeping about the manor in the dark, there was a series of furious knocks on the door, followed by muffled shouting and even more rapid knocking. If it had been one of her books, it likely would have been a mysterious stranger or a deranged killer. But she suspected that someone had been foolish enough to try to make it over to the lodge and gotten lost on the way back to their cabin. And if it was a deranged killer...she grabbed the poker from the fireplace. Just in case. 

A man toppled through onto her carpet the moment she opened her door. It was hard to make out what he looked like, underneath the massive jacket and the layer of snow coating him, but she thought she recognized him from that wine and cheese evening. He had been standing about in a corner while everyone else made attempts at conversation, looking quite pleased with the truly massive amount of cheese he had managed to collect. Jemma, stuck in the midst of a conversation about post-modernism, had been rather envious. 

“Thank you,” he gasped when he finally sat up, unwinding a long scarf from around his neck. “It's bloody miserable out there. I meant to get to my cottage but it's impossible to see anything with all the snow and yours was the first cabin I came across.”

“Why were you out in it in the first place?” Jemma asked, folding her arms across her chest and eyeing him suspiciously. “They sent an advisory, you know. We're all supposed to stay indoors until further notice.”

For good reason, clearly, judging by the snow that he was coated in. She'd followed the advisory down to every last detail, filling up jugs with purified water, sprinkling de-icing salt on the front porch of her cabin, and checking that she had all the right supplies in place. It had given her quite a satisfying feeling.

“Food delivery and laundry didn't make it this morning.” He hoisted a hamper of food and a canvas laundry sack up. “So I went to the lodge to get it and thought I could make it back before the storm got too bad. I was wrong.”

He winced, one side of his mouth twisting up ruefully. Now that he didn't have a scarf wrapped around half his face and a hat pulled down over the other half, she could begin to make it out properly. It was quite a nice face, actually. Sandy blonde hair with a hint of a curl to it, a dusting of scruff across his chin, and intensely blue eyes. She couldn't quite put a name to the color. The Mediterranean off the coast of Italy on a particularly brilliant summer's day, maybe? Or the bluebells that had grown in a meadow near her childhood home on the spring?

“Anyway,” he said. She must have been staring, she realized, and she firmly fixed her eyes on the fireplace instead, blushing. “I'm Leo Fitz. Technically it's Leopold but I go by Fitz so...I'm a set designer most of the time but I also paint so some of my friends thought it'd be a good birthday gift to send me here. 

“Jemma Simmons,” she said. “Writer.”

It was still a bit of a marvel sometimes, to be able to say that she was a writer. She'd been writing ever since primary school, scribbling down elaborate stories that involved dragons and prophecies in lined notebooks from the stationers'. She'd always had ideas, even if she hadn't always had the time to write them down in. Then, when she was working in a lab in graduate school, in the midst of endless titrating and piping and cell cultures, she'd written a book. That hadn't been the one that got published. The one after that hadn't been it either. But the third one had done it. And sometimes, when she caught a glimpse of one of her books in a store or when she mentioned that she wrote books and saw someone's face light up in recognition, like his was doing right now, it was like the first time she'd written the words “the end” all over again. 

“Cecily Vane, right? My friend Hunter loves those books. And my mum,” he added. “And half of the people I know, really.”

“Right. I'm actually here to try to write the next book. I'm a little stuck,” she admitted. “Only a little.”

He nodded, rocking back and forth on his heels and catching himself before he tipped all the way forward. “I'm a little stuck, too. Literally and metaphysically. All I've got in my cabin is a stack of blank canvases and one that was such a failure I had to cover the whole thing in black.”

“No one's even been murdered in my book yet,” Jemma said ruefully.

“Oh thank goodness,” he blurted out. “Everyone else that I've met here just keeps going on about their artistic process and how inspired they feel by the isolation and what the different kinds of trees they've planted around the ground signify. All of the trees all look like pine trees to me, honestly, and they all keep on quoting David Foster Wallace at me and--.”

Fitz sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “What I meant to say is that it's nice to meet someone else who's not...exactly overflowing with inspiration at the moment. Makes me feel a bit less like the odd one out who the whole retreat thing isn't working for.”

“I know exactly what you mean. It's nice to meet someone who's not a complete snob about my books,” she added cheerfully. “The moment that I mentioned I wrote mysteries at that wine and cheese hour, it was like I'd announced that I enjoyed committing bank robberies in my spare time.”

One of them had said “Oh, so you write genre fiction” and immediately started looking around the room for someone else to talk to. She had barely kept herself from pointing out that if you thought about it, “obvious author stand-in pretentiously wanders around Brooklyn” could be a genre too.

“You should send them my mum's way then. She'll set them straight. I don't suppose you could give me any hints on whether Cecily's going to end up with Robert or Henry? She's firmly in favor of Henry,” he said. 

“Do you have a preference?”

“I don't think Cecily needs either one of them, really. But I wouldn't mind Robert. Just don't tell my mother,” he added and laughed. 

“You know, I don't think she needs either one either. I just put them in for fun,” Jemma said and was rewarded with a surprisingly full-throated laugh. Fitz grinned at her, she smiled back, and for just a moment, although they barely knew each other at all, she couldn't help feeling that they understood each other perfectly. 

He glanced out the window, where the snow seemed to have gotten even higher in the few minutes since he had tumbled in. “Would you mind if I stayed for a little bit? Just till the storm passes and I can get back to my own cabin. I don't want to be a bother to you but well...I don't think I have much chance of getting back.”

“Not at all. The snow has to let up soon and until then--” She shrugged. “I don't mind. It's a big enough space for the two of us.”

 

It was not. Maybe she had just gotten too accustomed to being on her own after a few days at the retreat. Or maybe it was that at home, she always wrote in her study, happily secluded from humanity. Not with someone else just across the room, humming under their breath and chuckling occasionally as he turned the pages of one of the Terry Pratchett books he had found on the shelves. And certainly not with someone else poking around the kitchen, opening drawers and poking around cabinets and making the occasional alarming crash.

“Can I help you find anything?” she asked stiffly, after one particularly loud crash.

“Nah, I'm grand. I thought I might bake something actually, if it's not too much of a hassle to have some noise in the kitchen? As a thank you for letting me stay,” he added. “My mum taught me how and I've been told that my brownies aren't half-bad.”

She opened her mouth to inform him that she needed absolute peace and quiet in order to write, then promptly closed it. Because the truth was, she didn't. Daisy had used to help her make playlists for each of her books, each one over a hundred songs long, and she'd play them on repeat until she turned in her final draft. But the retreat had fairly strict quiet hours and she hadn't been able to figure out how to hook up her phone to the cabin's speakers. (And when she'd asked, the purple-haired man manning the front desk had told her, with an air of vague disdain, that most of their guests found they didn't need to turn to technology to amuse themselves.) It wouldn't be bad to have some noise, if only to have something different. She had felt out of sorts ever since she had arrived, knocked slightly askew, and the arrival of Leo Fitz on her doorstep had knocked her even further off base. Maybe what she needed was to be knocked all the way around again. 

“I think there's baking stuff in one of the bottom cabinets,” Jemma said. “I haven't really used it. I'm a good cook but the things I bake have always turned out to be a bit of a disaster. Salt mixed up with sugar, cookies that spread all the way across the pan, cakes that collapse in the middle...”

She winced a little, remembering Bobbi's birthday cake from last year. It had dripped straight out of the pan when she took it out of the oven. Daisy's boyfriend had had to drive all the way across town, probably breaking at least three traffic rules, to pick up a replacement from the only bakery that had been willing to make them a last-minute cake. 

“But can we manage brownies without imminent disaster?” Fitz grinned at her, bright and easy, and she felt her heart clench a little in her chest. He was charming, she suspected. Charming in spite of the humming and the chuckling and the crashing that had been bothering her just a few moments before. Probably too charming, judging by the way her heart was already beating madly away inside her chest.

“It'll have to be a delicate operation,” she said. “I'm not sure I can be trusted with the measuring cups.”

“But you can melt butter, right?” He peered inside the fridge and pulled out two sticks of butter, neatly unwrapping them and placing them in the middle of a saucepan. “Medium heat on the stove and just push them around until it's all the way melted. I promise that I'll intervene if disaster seems to be imminent.”

They made a good team, she discovered. Fitz knew exactly how to explain baking in a way that made sense to her and she knew exactly what he meant when he asked her to pass the flippy thing. It was easier too, when they had something to do instead of sitting awkwardly about the living room. They fell into an easy rhythm, talking every now and then as they measured out ingredients and passed mixing bowls back and forth. And when she accidentally got flour all over him, he just laughed and sent a handful of flour back in her direction. He had a good laugh, full and rich, and the sound of it sent a wave of warmth through her chest. 

The brownies were perhaps the best she had ever made. Not a very high bar to clear, admittedly, and she did perhaps put a little too much sugar in but they were still good: fudgy and thick and rich. 

Jemma was eating one of them as she attempted to write later, breaking off bits of it with a fork in one hand and typing halfheartedly with the other. She'd managed to inch the plot forward a few painful inches and then it had promptly come to a grinding halt. Nothing was making sense, all of Cecily's witty quips were falling flat, and even the bit of flirtation she'd tried to throw in lacked any of her customary snap or sparkle. So she hit the space bar. Hard.

“Still stuck?” Fitz had holed up by one of the windows, where he was sketching something on a pad of paper that had seemingly turned up out of nowhere. She'd craned her neck over a few times to try and get a glimpse of it but all she'd been able to see were a few rough lines, curves and angles scatted across the page and stubbornly refusing to hint at their future shape. 

“Extremely so.” She sighed and tipped her head back to stare up at the ceiling. It offered nothing in the way of inspiration.

“Would you want to talk about it? I'm not much of an expert on mysteries but maybe I can help you muddle through it? I mean, not if you don't want to, of course,” he said quickly. “I know that loads of writers are private about what they're doing and I didn't mean to, you know...but if I can help at all...”

“Maybe. But you have to swear to tell me if something sounds ridiculous,” she told him. “If I'm going to have someone throw a herring at Cecily or have her spot a mysterious figure dressed like a peacock.”

“I swear to warn you the moment I spot so much as a hint of herring.”

It helped. She hadn't thought it would. In fact, she'd mostly done it as a way of putting off her next chapter. But Fitz was an excellent listener. Quiet when she needed to ramble on, ready with the right question when she needed to work her way through something, and seemingly fascinated by it all, even when she went into what types of chairs an English country house in the 1930's might have had in its dining room. And he wasn't a writer but there was something there, something like the ease she'd had with her favorite critique partner Jane, that made her freely confess her fears that the various plot twists she had been considering might be too obvious. Or not obvious enough. Or that she hadn't spent enough time figuring out why Fredrick Hounslow's niece and second wife might join forces to murder him. Or that there was too much romance or not enough at all or any of the other things that kept her sleepless and cross at night. 

And somehow, saying it all out loud to someone else made it better. Saying it all out loud to Fitz made it better. And when Fitz went back to his sketching and she went back to her laptop, somehow, she managed to write three chapters before dinner and another three after it. 

“I think it might actually be good,” she said as she ate another piece of brownie, rotating the screen of her laptop towards him.

“Of course it's good,” Fitz said as he leaned across the table to peer at it. “I found one of your books on the shelves earlier and I, er, I read a bit of it. I really liked it, actually. It's really twisty and clever and Cecily's very funny and I might have to stay up late to finish it.”

He was turning a shade of violent pink and Jemma found herself blushing too. People told her that they liked her books all the time. Sometimes they said quite lovely things. But not all of them happened to have marvelously blue eyes and to have just talked her through one of the worst cases of writers' block she'd had in ages. 

“Thank you,” she mumbled. “I'd love to see some of the things you've been drawing sometime too, if you've got anything you don't mind showing people.”

“Maybe.” Fitz glanced down at his sketches, shaking and stretching one hand out at his side. “I'll have to talk myself into it first but...”

He laughed awkwardly. “I, ah, I had an accident about a year and a half ago. The sort of paintings that I used to do were very intricate and now I can't really do them anymore. I'm still sorting out what kinds of things I can do now, with this.”

He held up one hand, which shook slightly. “It gets worse when I'm tired or at the end of a day. But it's much better than it was, which is good. Just not the same as before. It's a bit hard to get accustomed to, though.”

“I can imagine,” Jemma said quietly. Then, on a sudden impulse, she moved her hand across the table to rest it on top of his. For a moment, so quick that she thought she might have imagined it, he twisted his fingers through hers. And then she went back to her writing and he went back to his sketching and they both went back to their massive mugs of tea.

It was quiet again, as it had been after he had first stumbled into her cabin. But it was a different kind of quiet now, comfortable and easy. The kind of quiet that it was almost possible to imagine living in.

 

They made pancakes the next morning, with blueberries and chocolate chips and strawberries on top, and drank English breakfast tea from the caddy of loose leaf she had brought with her. Outside, the snow was still coming down heavily, a wall of white as far as the eye could see. It felt a little like they were in a snow globe, a carefully constructed miniature world that had been shaken and turned over, and she found it hard to remember the lodge and all the other places that she had visited only a few days ago. Right now, inside the bubble, it was her and the novel and the heady feeling when the words were flowing that had come surging back even when she'd thought she lost it. And there was Fitz and somehow, he'd become a part of it too.

“I've got a cramp from typing,” she informed him after lunch. “It feels marvelous.”

“I think I've got something too,” he said and turned his sketchpad around for her to take a look at it. It was a sketch of the living room in the cabin, the bookshelves stretching across the walls, the snow coming down outside the window, and her bent over her laptop on the couch. It was simple, just pencil lines on white paper, but the lines and shading practically glowed with life. The snow swirled and stormed outside the window, rough and soft all at once, and somehow Fitz had managed to capture the glow of the lamp on the table and the concentration in the set of her neck. 

“Fitz,” she breathed. “That's gorgeous.”

He beamed at her. 

That afternoon, they uncovered a cache of DVDs in one of the upstairs bedrooms. It was a strange assortment: a few romantic comedies from the mid-2000s, one revenge thriller starring Liam Neeson, a costume drama that had won a gaggle of Oscars fifteen years ago, and four seasons of The Great British Bake-Off. 

“Right then.” Fitz fanned out the DVDs in a circle around them. “Are you in the mood to watch people fall in love after one of them spills coffee on the other, to spot historical inaccuracies, or to feel inadequate about your baking skills?”

“The last one, please.”

“Do you think you could make madeleines?” she asked him thoughtfully halfway through patisserie week. They were sitting next to each other on the couch, even though technically they could have each claimed an end as their own, and occasionally her ankle bumped up against his. It sent a warm shock through her body each time they touched, a prickling awareness that was surprisingly pleasant.

“Maybe,” Fitz said. “It'd be tricky in my kitchen but yeah, I think I could do it with practice.”

“I have a tiny New York kitchen,” he explained a few minutes later. “Exactly one counter and it's very short. But I usually make things work.”

“You live in New York?” She hit the pause button on the remote and turned to him. “I live in New York. In Brooklyn. We might have met each other a hundred times over. We could have even met and forgotten all about it.”

“I don't think I could have forgotten meeting you,” he said quietly.

Jemma blushed. 

 

It was easy to talk to him, she found. Making odd remarks as she looked up from the screen of her laptop every now and then and having Fitz respond from where he was bent over his sketchpad. Seemingly endless conversations as they talked about books they'd read and TV shows they'd loved and the million tiny triumphs and aggravations that made up living in New York.

“I couldn't imagine living anywhere else,” Fitz said. “I thought the whole place was full of mad people when I first moved there but now...I love it. Although maybe I've gone a bit mad too.”

“Everyone does in New York,” she said knowingly. 

He'd like her favorite bookstore. And the Italian place she went to on Friday nights to eat crusty bread and massive dishes of pasta. And the farmers' market she bought whatever was in season at, where her favorite vendor always kept a basket of berries aside for her in the summer. And there was an exhibit she thought they might like to see together and a film festival they might like to go to and a new restaurant she'd been looking for someone to try it with and...she was thinking like they would keep on seeing each other when the retreat ended, Jemma realized. Like she wanted that more than anything. 

 

The snow stopped a day and a half later. Halfway through the interrogation of a key witness, she looked up from her keyboard and instead of the wall of white she had become accustomed to, there was the sky. It was even blue. 

“I have half a book,” she said wonderingly, rising from the couch and turning to face him. “Fitz, the snow's finally stopped and I have half a book.”

“I have an entire sketchbooks worth of drawings,” Fitz said, tracing the lines of one sketch as he looked up at her, face wide with a wonder that matched hers. “I thought that something was stoppered up permanently but then...I suppose the retreat thing really does work then?”

“I don't think it would have worked half as well without you,” she admitted. 

Fitz looked at her, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth and his blue eyes fixed on hers, and she felt almost dizzy with the force of his gaze, and she had to do something about it. 

“And I was wondering, actually, if you have a business card?” she blurted out. 

“A business card?”

It was possibly the most ridiculous thing she'd ever said. “Or I can give you mine,” Jemma added. “With my phone number on it? I just don't want to lose touch with you. If you don't want to lose touch with me, of course. I would understand if you--”

“Jemma Simmons. I may have only known you for a few days.” He swallowed nervously, shifting his sketchbook between his hands. “But I already think you're one of the most remarkable people I've ever met. And I was wondering, actually, if when they finally dig us out of this snow, you'd consider going out to dinner with me?”

She answered him with a kiss. It was perhaps the sweetest she'd ever had, soft and tender and full of possibility, with a banked heat simmering just below the surface. Fitz's sketchbook went crashing to the floor as he slid one arm around her waist to draw her closer and cupped her face with the other. He kissed like she was the loveliest thing he'd ever seen, like he needed nothing more than to keep on kissing her, like he would memorize every inch of her. She sighed and melted further into him, drinking in the feel of him against her. 

Fitz blinked at her dazedly. “So that's a yes?” 

“Of course it's a yes.” She smiled at him, a wide impossible grin that made her cheeks hurt with the force of it. “It feels like I've been thinking about asking you for ages but I wasn't sure if you thought of me that way and I would have felt quite silly if you'd said no and we were still stuck here and I--”

Fitz kissed her this time. 

 

The next fall, the ninth book in the Cecily Vane series launched to general acclaim. Copies flew off the shelves, readers waited patiently in seemingly endless lines to meet Jemma, and the dedication page of each and every book bore one simple inscription:

_To Fitz—for everything and more_  
Love,  
Jemma


End file.
